In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Simon Newcomb (an American astronomer), John Dewey (an American philosopher and educator), and others proposed the use of Scientific Method in teaching, especially in the teaching of science. However, today most students"" experience in school is similar to that of Carl Sagan (an American astronomer):
There was an answer we were supposed to get. We were marked off if we didn""t get it. There was no encouragement to pursue our own interests or hunches or conceptual mistakes.
Although many of today""s classrooms are equipped with computer terminals and are connected to the Internet, the emphasis is still on rote memory of particular facts and principles rather than an understanding of how various facts and principles may be derived from careful observation and experimentation. Accordingly, observation, experimentation and heuristic reasoning plays little if any role in modem computer assisted education.
This invention puts Scientific Method at the center of the teaching and learning process. Real experiments are performed (or simulated) for a predefined range of experimental parameters and a humanly perceptible representation (preferably a sequence of images) of each experiment is stored on a data server, where they are retrievable for subsequent presentation on a student terminal.
Experimental data is collected in response to the student""s interaction with the displayed experiment, using the terminal""s user interface. For example, the student may select an object in a frame of a video image sequence to collect data comprised of the object""s characteristics, such as position, and data measurements from the selected object""s characteristics may be automatically calculated, recorded and reported to the student.
A programmed processor provides instructional feedback data to the student, preferably using summaries of the collected data, vocabulary words and definitions, and other information linked to one or more related experiments, to thereby create a course module consisting of one or more lessons.
In a preferred embodiment, students select experiments to run by selecting from parameters selected by the processor, which then retrieves and presents a perceptible representation of an associated experiment. Students are preferably encouraged to run multiple experiments using different.
The preferred embodiment also provides a data analysis phase following the data collection phase, in which graphs and data summaries provided during data collection aid students in analyzing the results by testing predefined hypotheses and identifying which have been proven true and which have been proven false. The data collection and data analysis process is preferably repeated in an iterative fashion until all hypotheses have been proven either true or false.
The inventive apparatus is defined in general terms in independent claim 1. Characteristic features of certain specific embodiments of the invention are set forth in the following description of a presently preferred embodiment, and in the appended dependent claims.